Crucified for Life – a Few More Thoughts

I can hardly believe that I have written over 60 posts on this blog to date. The more I write, the more I feel God leading me deeper into His heart. The other day I got a new sense of what restoration means and it has to do with God’s plan to deal with evil. As I see it today, God’s purpose, seen throughout Scripture, is to restore His people, one person at a time, back to the type of intimate relationship Adam and Eve had with God in the Garden of Eden. He wants each of us to live with Him in the Kingdom of God (where He calls us friends), now and for eternity.

But there is another way to look at God’s plan of restoration: God wants to defeat the power of evil, He wants to wring evil out of his Creation. His plan of restoration, which includes you and me and all of Creation, is most fundamentally focused on restoring His Creation back to a state of harmony, order, organization, purpose, function, and life; the state in which chaos, disease, rebellion, randomness, aimlessness, and death are absent. In other words, a state in which there is no evil. That state, which God is even now creating, is the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God, present now (although not in its fullness, yet), is God’s answer to the problem of evil.

As I reflect on evil (more on that in a later post) I find myself thinking about suffering. Suffering is the manifestation or outcome of evil working in our lives and in the world around us. Much of the suffering we experience in this fallen world is done to us. Some suffering is brought on by our own choices. But I believe that generally all suffering is the opposite of God’s will for our lives. Sometimes God brings suffering into our lives to get our attention, but generally I believe that God’s will is for us not to suffer. Of course, when suffering hits, God meets us in that place, if we let Him in, and incredible grace and mercy pour into our lives, often transforming and healing us.

As I thought more about suffering (I am taking you into my thought process here — deeper down the rabbit hole, you might say), it occurred to me that there are 3 basic types of suffering: 1) the internal type, where we battle the voices of darkness that accuse and condemn us, often resulting in shame and guilt, depression,and despair; 2) the external type where evil is done to us by other humans in the form of physical and emotional abuse, genocide, war, sex-trafficking, terrorism, neighborhood shootings; school violence, persecution, etc.; 3) and suffering caused by natural evil like disease, including cancer; tragic accidents, and natural disasters like earthquakes, tsunamis, and tornadoes. All of these forms of evil cause pain, despair, fear, depression: in other words, suffering.

As I was praying one morning (I can’t remember the specific thing I was praying for) I felt God tell me that there was one more type of suffering; the suffering we experience when we “pick up our cross” to follow Christ — the pain, even agony, we experience when we crucify the self-life in order to live more fully in the Kingdom of God (which, to me, means to follow Jesus). It is this type of suffering that God is intimately involved in. I remember asking a man with a pronounced limp if I could pray for the healing of his leg. He said “no, this is the cross I have to bear”. He was wrong. It was a burden he had to bear. A cross is a place of death, the cross is a place of suffering.

Jesus is clear. “Anyone who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me” (Matthew 10: 38); “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it” (Matthew 16: 24, 25); “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9: 23). Why would I pick up my cross? To be crucified, at the time and place of Jesus’s choosing.

Paul reiterates Jesus’ command to be crucified: “For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin — because anyone who had died had been freed from sin” (Romans 6: 6, 7). Paul also tells us in Galatians how important it is to be crucified: “I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me” (Galatians 2: 20); and “Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the sinful nature with its passions and desires” (Galatians 5: 24); and finally “May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything; what counts is a new creation” (Galatians 6: 14, 15).

Jesus and Paul are talking about the death of our self-lives – the lives we led in the kingdom of self. The death of pride and ego. In my terms, the death of our dependence on those things in the world that give us our value and acceptance, the things we worship, our idols. This giving up, really a turning away from something that has given us ‘life’ (as false as that life is), is painful. Sometimes really painful, like the withdrawal from a drug like alcohol or heroin (or food, or the internet, or pornography, or gambling, or sports, or . . . whatever).

As I see it, crucifying those things that we worship is repentance. We don’t just repent of what we have done, we repent of who we are. We don’t just crucify our behavior, we crucify that part in our heart that finds its value apart from Jesus. The result of crucifixion (and repentance) is transformation, a new creation, a new heart.

This death or crucifixion is always painful and therefore meets the criteria for suffering. But it is a death that, if followed all the way through, ends in resurrection.

I know of no better description of this type of suffering than that written by A. W. Tozer in his book ‘The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine’. Here are some excerpts from that book describing this type of suffering:

Writing about why many Christians stand just outside of the Holy of Holies (the Kingdom of God) when the veil has been torn, and do not enter in, content to remain in the kingdom of self, Tozer says “What is it (i.e. the reason)? What but the presence of a veil in our hearts? A veil not taken away as the first veil was, but which remains there still shutting out the light and hiding the face of God from us. It is the veil of our fleshly, fallen nature living on, unjudged within us, uncrucified and unrepudiated (I would say unrepented). It is the close-woven veil of the self-life which we have never truly acknowledged, of which we have been secretly ashamed, and which for these reasons we have never brought to the judgment of the Cross . . . It is woven of the fine threads of the self-life, the hyphenated sins of the human spirit. They are not something we do, they are something we are, and therein lies both their subtlety and their power”.

“To be specific, the self-sins are self-righteousness, self-pity, self-confidence, self-sufficiency, self-admiration, self-love and a host of others like them. They dwell too deep within us and are too much a part of our nature to come to our attention till the light of God is focused on them” . . .

“Self is the opaque veil that hides the face of God from us. It can be removed only in spiritual experience, never by mere instruction. We may as well try to instruct leprosy out of our system. There must be a work of God in our system before we are free” . . .

“In human experience that veil is made of living spiritual tissue; it is composed of the sentient, quivering stuff of which our whole beings consist, and to touch it is to touch us where we feel pain. To tear it away is to injure us, to hurt us and make us bleed. To say otherwise is to make the cross no cross and death no death at all. It is never fun to die. To rip through the dear and tender stuff of which life is made can never be anything but deeply painful . . . Let us beware of tinkering with our inner life, hoping ourselves to rend the veil. God must do everything for us. Our part (and we do have a part – my words) is to yield and trust”.

We must repent! And not repent just of what we have done; but repent of who we are. As I have said in other posts, repentance is a gift from God. We cannot wake up one morning and say “I think I will repent today”. It is totally the work of God, but I must participate – repentance is not possible without my cooperation. But God does the work. What is the work? The Holy Spirit takes a knife and cuts away the veil of spiritual flesh around my heart so that I can leave behind the kingdom of self and enter into the Kingdom of God. Until I have repented, until I have suffered this type of death, until this spiritual flesh has been crucified, I will continue to live in the kingdom of self, no matter what words of acceptance (as in “I accept Jesus as my savior”) I have publicly or privately spoken.

After the work is completed and the veil of spiritual flesh is cut away “There comes a moment when . . . the suffering victim dies. After that is resurrection glory and power, and the pain is forgotten for joy that the veil is taken away and we have entered in actual spiritual experience the presence of the living God.” (these quotes are from pages 41 – 44 in my version of ‘The Pursuit of God’, ISBN 978-1-60066-054-2, published by ‘Wing Spread Publishers).

This is the ‘new creation’ that Paul refers to in Galatians 6: 15. We have entered the Kingdom of God, we have been born again. Through this fourth type of suffering, we have entered life. But there is no life without this type of suffering. This is what Jesus means when He says “whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it”. To save your life you must lose it. To live you must die. Or, you must be crucified for life. There is no other way. We cannot serve two masters; you cannot have dual citizenship. You must turn away from one in order to serve the other. You must crucify your self-life in order to live your life for and with Jesus. There must be death and not just any old death — death on a cross. And that type of death, as Tozer says, is painful.

Notice that in the Luke passage quoted above (Luke 9: 23), Jesus tells us to pick up our cross daily. As I have said elsewhere in this blog “we don’t repent, we are repentant”. In other words, we repent daily. As I have said before, we don’t hear the word ‘repent’ often from the pulpit. How would it go over with the congregation if the Pastor preached “be crucified” regularly? But without death by the cross to our self-life we are not followers of Jesus, we cannot know the abundant, Kingdom life. Without this type of death, this turning from our ‘idols’ our hearts will not belong to Jesus. We might intellectually assent to Him, but we will never be His.

Here is another important point. Just as we cannot resurrect ourselves (it has to be done in the power of the Holy Spirit), we cannot crucify our self-life. It is a work of God, done in the power of the Holy Spirit, even though Jesus tells us “You must deny yourself”. Jesus means that God will not undertake this work without our invitation and participation. We trust, we submit, we cry out — and God does the work. We bear the pain, but He heals. Our new life begins with repentance, involves our cross and death on that cross, and ends with the rebirth of that part of our life — transformed, born again, resurrected, restored into a Kingdom life. We begin in the kingdom of self, and end up in the Kingdom of God. Then we do it again with another piece of our heart that is still in thrall to the self-life. As we experience crucifixion of our hearts daily (ok, maybe weekly) we experience more and more of the resurrection life. This is the process of restoration!! This is the gift of repentance, the gift of crucifixion. This is the Kingdom of God.

What does this type of crucifixion look like? How does it happen? It is probably different for each person, but this is what it looks like for me. First, I ask God what part of my heart/life is separating me from Him. I usually don’t like the answer to that question. After a certain amount of dithering around on my part and many false starts, I begin to take the issue seriously. At this point I am usually desperate — what if I continue sinning in this way? Will God walk away from me, turn me loose? Then, I repent. I cry out to God and say “Lord take this away from me. I am powerless to do it on my own (I know. I have tried). And then, sometimes immediately, sometimes over time, I am set free from the thing that held me in bondage. But there is pain as I ‘withdraw’. I have had to give up relationships, certain books and TV programs, trips to the refrigerator. I have had to struggle with the fear of not being relevant, and especially the fear and anxiety associated with what other people think of me (the need to be accepted by men). Fear and anxiety are forms of suffering. Some people will have to crucify the need to be in control; perhaps the need to be in control of a ministry they founded but has grown beyond them. Others will have to crucify addictions. Or, I should say Jesus will have to set them free from these things; He will have to heal. In the midst of all of this type of suffering the accuser, our enemy, will be speaking words of condemnation and discouragement. He might say “to little, to late” or “nothing is happening. You are on your own”, or “you are not worth the effort”. Lies, all lies.

I started this post writing about evil. Evil is a force that impinges on and permeates all of us in the kingdom of self. In fact, as we live the self-life we release evil into the world. It is no use pointing the finger at someone else and say ‘they are evil’ until we have looked evil in the eye in our own heart. God’s answer to this — to the evil in our hearts and the evil in the world — is the Kingdom of God. Evil cannot penetrate into God’s Kingdom. We can enter through the torn curtain, because we have been forgiven and washed clean of all the evil in us and all the evil we have committed, when we repent and believe. Evil cannot get into the Kingdom because evil cannot repent. In the Kingdom of God we are set free from evil, we experience the indwelling Holy Spirit, we are transformed — a new creation. As we are ‘in-Christ’ we experience healing and wholeness, if not physically but for sure spiritually and emotionally (I don’t believe that a person needs to be in the Kingdom of God to experience healing — Jesus healed many who apparently weren’t in the Kingdom, although their healing was a manifestation of Kingdom power and after their healing they might have repented and entered the Kingdom. But my experience with healing is that it is a whole lot easier to heal someone emotionally and physically who is already a Kingdom man or woman).

We must never confuse suffering imposed on us by evil, as I discussed above, with the suffering associated with crucifixion necessary to enter the Kingdom of God. The former brings death — death to peace and joy, life and liveliness, hope, and relationships; it brings chaos. The latter brings life — peace and joy, security in the Lord, healing and wholeness, and order and organization. The former is a ‘burden’, it can be heavy and can plunge us into darkness. The latter is the cross and through death on the cross it brings light and life. We pray against the former, we embrace the latter as a gift.

And then, the biggest miracle of all.  As we live in the Kingdom of God, as the self-life is crucified, and we begin to live the ‘saved life’ of the Kingdom (life in the Kingdom  = salvation), the Kingdom of God is released into the world through us. God uses us to further his mission — to defeat the power of death and darkness in the world, now — one person at a time.

Hallelujah!